When at the very gates another delay in that evening of delays occurred. This time it was a tyre-burst. Rivière, impatient of further waste of time, paid off the chauffeur and started on foot along the entrance drive. The drizzle of the afternoon had ceased, and a few stars shone halfheartedly through rents in the ragged curtain of cloud, as though performing a duty against their will.
When passing through the box-hedged lawn as a short cut to the front door, one of the curtains of the lighted drawing-room was suddenly thrown back, and the broad figure of man stood framed in a golden panel of light. It was Lars Larssen.
Rivière stopped involuntarily. It was as though his antagonist had divined his presence and had come boldly forward to meet him. And, indeed, that was not far from the fact. Larssen, waiting alone in the drawing-room, had had one of his strange intuitive impulses to throw wide the curtain and look out into the night. Such an impulse he never opposed. He had learnt by long experience that there were centres of perception within him, uncharted by science, which gathered impressions too vague to put a name to, and yet vitally real. He always gave rein to his intuition and let it lead him where it chose.
Looking out into the night, the shipowner could not see Rivière, who had stopped motionless in the shadow of a giant box clipped to the shape of a peacock standing on a broad pedestal.
Rivière waited.
Presently Larssen turned abruptly as though someone had entered the room. A smile of welcome was on his lips. Olive swept in, close-gowned in black with silvery scales. She offered her hand with a radiant smile, and Larssen took it masterfully and raised it to his lips. Rivière noted that it was not the shipowner who had moved forward to meet Olive, but Olive who had come gladly to him.
They stood by the fireplace, and Olive chatted animatedly to her guest. Rivière scarcely recognized his wife in this transformation of spirit. With him she was cold and abrupt, and captious, eyes half-lidded and cheeks white and mask-like. Now her eyes flashed and sparkled, and there was warm colour in her cheeks.
Of what Olive and Larssen said to one another, no word came to Rivière. But attitude and gesture told him more than words could have done. It was as though he were a spectator of a bioscope drama, standing in darkness while a scene was being pictured for him in remorseless detail behind the lighted window. That Olive's feeling for Larssen had grown beyond mere friendship was plain beyond question. She was infatuated with the man; and he was playing with her infatuation.
For a moment Rivière's fist clenched; then his fingers loosened, and he watched without stirring. Larssen must, in view of his action on the Hudson Bay coup, believe Matheson to be dead. To him, Olive was now a widow. Therefore Rivière had no quarrel with the shipowner on the ground of what he was now witnessing. His desire to crumple Larssen in the hollow of his hand and fling him into the mud at his feet was based on very different grounds.
On the other hand, Olive must believe Matheson to be alive. Larssen would have told her that her husband was away in Canada on business for a few weeks, and he would keep up the fiction until the Hudson Bay scheme were floated to a public issue.